The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) has introduced a voluntary disclosure opportunity for taxpayers to declare their foreign income accounts within a three-month period, commencing on May 1, 2024.
Under this initiative, taxpayers who adhere to the directive will benefit from waived interest on their accounts.
Julie Essiam, the Commissioner-General of the GRA, announced the commencement of the implementation of the tax declaration policy on foreign income accounts through a series of posts shared via X on April 15.
Essiam further stated that GRA teams are actively preparing letters to be sent to individual account holders as part of this initiative.
“So, by May 2, 2024, those letters might have gone out,” Julie Essiam wrote via X.
She added, “If individuals come forward within three months and say that, this is the amount in this account, the interest on the account will be waived and that is the voluntary disclosure aspect of this measure.”
The recent action taken by the government’s revenue agency comes in the wake of an announcement by the Commissioner-General on April 13, 2024, regarding a fresh compliance strategy aimed at monitoring the foreign earnings of resident Ghanaians.
This new initiative is intended to supplant the temporarily suspended Value Added Tax (VAT) on electricity and seeks to establish a consistent revenue stream beyond the year 2024.
The Commissioner-General of the GRA emphasized that while this measure is not novel, it has existed within the legal framework for some time, albeit without effective implementation.
“So, the measure that we put in place is a compliance measure on foreign income of resident Ghanaians.
“This measure is already in the law, as the minister said, so it is not a new measure. The difference is that its implementation and application have not been implemented effectively,” the GRA Commissioner-General said in her brief remarks at the joint IMF, BoG and Ministry of Finance presser held in Accra on April 13, 2024.
Julie Essiam added that “The GRA, with support from the Organization for African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (OACD), has refined the processes and structures to ensure effective implementation.
“So for us to implement this measure, we have, with the aid and assistance of the OACD, gone through sustainable processes and structures to ensure that when we implement this measure, the sustainability of this measure is going to go beyond 2024 in our revenue numbers.
“So this is the measure that, together with the Government of Ghana and our mother ministry, the Ministry of Finance, is going to take place or is going to replace the VAT on electricity.”
